McGinniss, Joe, Jr. 1970- (Joe McGinniss)

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McGinniss, Joe, Jr. 1970- (Joe McGinniss)

PERSONAL:

Born 1970; son of Joe McGinniss (a writer); married; children: one son. Education: Attended Swarthmore College; received master's degree.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Washington, DC. Agent—Kath-arine Cluverius, International Creative Management, 40 W. 57th St., New York, NY 10019. E-mail—joemcginnissjr@aol.com.

CAREER:

Author, 2008—.

WRITINGS:

The Delivery Man, Black Cat/Grove (New York, NY), 2008.

Also author of the blog Joe McGinniss, Jr.

ADAPTATIONS:

Film rights for The Delivery Man have been optioned by Whitsett Hill Entertainment.

SIDELIGHTS:

Joe McGinniss, Jr.'s debut novel The Delivery Man is a story about characters who have lost their motivation and their guidelines. Set in Las Vegas, the book is the story of Chase, a city native, who has returned to Vegas after attending art school at New York University. Outwardly, Chase is a success story: he has a girlfriend (Julia) who is earning an MBA out-of-state, and he plans to relocate to San Francisco with her when she has her degree in hand. In the meantime, he has accepted a job teaching high school in Vegas. But Chase's commitment to his chosen occupation is tenuous at best; he "often gets to work late or doesn't show up at all," explained Bookslut Web site contributor Elizabeth Bachner. "He lives in a hotel room, immobilizing himself, and has strange excuses not to meet up with his girlfriend, not to work, not to leave."

Instead, Chase reacquaints himself with his old high school friends: Michele, Bailey, and Hunter. Michele has become a prostitute and madam, gathering a ring of teenagers who turn tricks in the hotels of Las Vegas's Strip and advertising their services over the Internet through Web pages like MySpace. Bailey is her boyfriend and pimp. Hunter has little or no ambition, and his life just slides along. Conspicuous by her absence is another member of their old gang: Chase's sister Carly, who died in the intervening years from a drug overdose. After Chase loses his job following a fight with a student, he is reduced to becoming Michele's chauffeur, driving her and her clients to their different jobs and picking them up after their tricks are done. "Chase is an anti-hero," McGinniss told an interviewer for the Wordsmiths Books Web site. "He knows what he should want, even what he should do, but he is convinced he doesn't have it in him to pull it off. So he takes comfort in navigating a world he knows best. One that won't put too many demands on him, despite the chaos and danger that swirls around him." As the novel advances "it becomes clearer and clearer," wrote John Minervini on Willamette Week Online, "that he isn't leaving."

McGinniss, critics noted, makes Las Vegas's attraction for Chase understandable. "It's a fascinating place so full of contradictions and dangers and the most basic aspirations: prosperity by any means," he told a writer in an interview published on McGinniss's Web site. "A house, a safe street and thick green lawn and no rain or Midwest winters. So you have these people coming as a last resort or today, from Central America and Mexico as a first attempt at ‘the American Dream’ i.e., the ability to earn enough money so that you can take care of your family, become middle class then become a good consumer of all that our economy and culture has to offer." Critics also compared McGinniss's accomplishment in The Delivery Man to the work of Bret Easton Ellis, another chronicler of the empty lives of desperate young people, although noting that Ellis's characters tend to be children of privilege rather than lower-middle-class, like Chase and Michele. "Like its closest spiritual forebear, Bret Easton Ellis's encyclopedically inertial ‘Less Than Zero’ (1985)," Ed Park stated in the New York Times Book Review, "The Delivery Man offers unflinching glimpses at mores in free fall, shock treatment in service to a woozy morality tale." "In a sort of diffused paternal imprimatur, Ellis, whose career was kick-started by McGinniss's father, Joe McGinniss, the author of Fatal Vision," Park added, "reportedly was an early champion of TheDelivery Man." "This atmospheric page-turner gains increasing depth," declared Joanne Wilkinson, writing in Booklist, "as it barrels toward a gut-wrenching conclusion."